Chicago • “Get the thing straight once and for all: The policeman isn’t there to create disorder,” said the late Mayor Richard J. Daley in explaining the riots in the streets of his city in the summer 1968. “The policeman is there to preserve disorder.”
Daley's verbal jumble became the butt of jokes and the source of claims, inspired by Freud, that Da Mayor had unintentionally blurted out the truth.
Yet he may also have been an accidental prophet. The chaos on the streets of Chicago during the Democrats' catastrophic national convention 50 years ago this week lives on not only in memory, but also in our fractured present.